CEO Spotlight on ChaCha’s Jones
We’re thrilled to introduce you to Scott Jones, CEO and Co-founder of ChaCha. Scott graciously answered our questions yesterday, shortly after his company announced its new mobile initiative which allows users to text questions to 242242 (ChaCha on a phone keypad) and receive text answers on their cell phones.
Scott Jones is a prolific inventor, a dynamic serial entrepreneur, and a passionate pioneer. For more than two decades, Scott has used his strategic foresight to create companies that have produced over a dozen award-winning industry firsts. He revolutionized the modern workplace in the mid-1980s, when at age 26, after forming his first company, Boston Technology, he became a noted voicemail inventor, developing the voicemail system that is now used by nearly all telephone companies around the globe.
In the mid-1990s, he created Escient, which he later transformed into Gracenote— one of the first companies to develop music recognition software that is now at the heart of several Internet music products, such as Apple’s iPod and iTunes, Yahoo’s and AOL’s music services, and Sony’s VAIO computer line.
In 2005, Scott founded IndyRobotics, LLC (now known as Precise Path Robotics) and created Indiana’s Robotic Vehicle (IRV), one of the world’s premier self-driving robot vehicles. Leveraging that technology, several new products are in the works, including a robotic lawnmower. Scott’s latest venture is ChaCha, a human search engine that leverages the power of human intelligence — and has substantial financial backing from such investors as Bezos Expeditions (the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos), Rod Canion, founding CEOof Compaq Computer, Morton Meyerson and Jack Gill.
ASE: Thanks for taking the time to chat with today. This is a very exciting time for you, I’m sure. Congratulations on your new mobile service!I’ve been reading up on you and am impressed by your myriad inventions. (I love that your personal website describes you as a ‘serial entrepreneur’). You’ve also been called a creative genius. But being a genius is different from working with teams in a collaborative way and inspiring them to execute your vision. Tell me how you manage this and talk about the challenges of rallying the troops.
SAJ: One of the most important ingredients is hiring the right team in the first place. We hire “A” players who have proven that they enjoy collaborating with others to “change the world”. Given that we are writing the history books right now with this game-changing business, it’s all about keeping our vision planted firmly in front of everyone on the team. We’ve been getting increasingly better at laser-focusing the company on “mobile search” which is where we really win.
ASE: What are the top qualities you look for in your team members and how do you recruit talent?
SAJ: We look really smart people who have proven themselves with “done it before” performance. Because we are doing something completely new and unique, we often need to hire “top athletes” who are able to adapt and adjust to what is wanted and needed at ChaCha.
ASE: How/where do you find and train the ChaCha search experts?
SAJ: We have many sources of our ChaCha Guides, who have various roles behind the scenes. Some are librarians who are generalists. Some are experts in specific domains such as “foodies” who love restaurants, or sports enthusiasts for basketball, baseball, football, etc…. Others are work-at-home moms, retirees, or college kids who have expertise in a specific area or general searching skills. People can apply to become a ChaCha Guide at http://www.chacha.com/info/guidesignup.
ASE: I’ve been familiar with Tellme for several years. How is ChaCha different/similar?
SAJ: As you know, Tellme was acquired by Microsoft last year. They have voice front-end technologies that can be applied to directory assistance or customer service. They are heavily reliant on speech recognition to deliver services such as “yellow pages” directory assistance. However, speech recognition still has severe problems when confronted by open-ended search. They “cheat” by forcing users through a labyrinth of menus in order to narrow choices for the computer to understand. Tellme technology is restricted to very small decision trees. It’s one reason why they get business listings wrong so often. And they can’t even offer generalized white pages (residential) listings, let alone generalized “web search”. We sidestep all that hassle and inaccuracy by putting a human in the loop to correctly vet the query and find the desired information quickly.
ASE: On your website you say that one should never discard one’s ideas, no matter how impossible they seem. What bravado! Where did you get this confidence to follow your instincts and disregard the naysayers?
SAJ: Not *all* ideas are good ones. It requires developing a good filter for what are the good ideas or bad ones. Often this knowledge can be gained by finding people who seem to be good at it already and using them as sounding boards. It’s usually a good idea to have multiple inputs from a number of people who are open to new ways of thinking. And, if one gets positive reinforcement, it then takes tenacity, stamina, and often creativity to figure out how to transform the idea into a reality.
ASE: How do you decide whom to listen to? I read that Kurt Vonnegut shot down your idea for ChaCha and yet here we are today.
SAJ: Well, obviously, Kurt Vonnegut is a smart guy, but it was clear that he had maximum interest in “the experience” and less interest in what he might call gratuitous technology. See my new blog www.scottajones.com/blog for more color on that story. By accumulating inputs from a number of creative and smart people, it allows me to formulate a more rounded and fully-informed view of whether the idea is worth pursuing.
ASE: Talk about the integrated platform on college campuses. How does it work? What inspired it?
SAJ: We believe that college campuses are often where thought leadership originates. Having had a longstanding relationship with my (and my partner’s) alma mater, we decided Indiana University would be the perfect spot for us to try to add value to the college environment. We created a strategic alliance with IU so we can experiment together with how our history-making technology can really make a difference. “Information is power,” so what better place to provide better and more accessible information than on the college campus?
ASE: What’s your relationship with Sundance Film Fest and how did it come about? Are you a film buff?
SAJ: Our marketing team (including internal and external resources) was contemplating our ChaCha SMS text launch a few months ago and quickly came to the conclusion that launching in a “noisy” environment such as CES would be ineffective. So, someone came up with the non-traditional concept of getting in front of fifty thousand film fanatics at the nation’s top film festival and providing information that is core and critical to their Sundance experience. We think it’s a brilliant way to begin “crossing the chasm”. And, yes, I love movies! (Who doesn’t?) You can see more about our Sundance relationship at http://www.chacha.com/sundance/alerts.
ASE: Many of the ASEs have interesting and inspired names. And I’m always curious about their origins. So, why ‘ChaCha?” Are you a dancer?
SAJ: The word for “search” in Chinese is “Cha”. In the Americas, “ChaCha” refers to a dance. So, it seemed natural to choose a name for our human-powered search engine that involves dancing with a guide to achieve great search results, especially when “on the move!”
ASE: ChaCha and other ASEs have definitely garnered their fair share of publicity. While everyone wants to root for an ASE to overtake Google, no one seems to believe that it’s actually possible. What are your thoughts about this? Do you see ChaCha partnering with other alts to bundle search and possibly trump Google? Could this improve scalability?
SAJ: My companies in the past have always “taken on the big guys” (such as AT&T, Octel, which is now Lucent, Sony, Microsoft), but in a way that sidestepped their prowess. We’re using the same strategy here. Google is the dominant player in desktop search, and we have never intended to take them on directly, although some people have attempted to pigeonhole us. In fact, we are very collaborative with Google in much of what we do. However, we believe that we are adding a significant value component of the search equation that is not addressed by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, or any of the other search engines. Instead of providing a million results dumped in your lap in a split second (which doesn’t work at all in a mobile environment), we are providing the human component that allows us to intelligently provide a short direct answer to the query of the moment, from anywhere and at anytime.We don’t think any of the first-generation search engines can even begin to approach the mobile market with a solution that is so elegant and valuable at that “peak demand moment” for end users, especially when they are on the run, in their cars, etc…. And if anyone questions the scalability of ChaCha, I have a distinct advantage of having founded and led multiple companies that figured out the scalability issues of technologies such as voicemail (#1 in the world today, used by most phone companies around the world) and music identification (again, #1 music database and music recognition software on the planet, built into ipod, iphone, yahoo, AOL, cell phones, cars, living rooms), even in the face of much skepticism, to achieve dominant market share. For more background, see www.scottajones.com.
ASE: What’s the estimated response time for text queries sent to ChaCha? Personally I asked for the capital of Norway and received the answer (Oslo) in under a minute. Is this about average or will it vary?
SAJ: We are currently seeing response times in the 3-4 minute range, on average, but we believe that we can tune the system fairly quickly to deliver answers within 2 minutes, on average. And for many questions, we should be able to provide answers about sports scores, weather, stock quotes, phone numbers, etc… virtually instantaneously.
ASE: What’s next for ChaCha? What’s next for you?
SAJ: ChaCha is a transformative, change-the-world concept that is unquestionably bigger than Google’s concept. Several industry insiders (some of whom know Google inside and out) have “inspected under the hood” and declared that we represent a bigger concept, *if* we can execute.We are eight years behind them so I think that pretty clearly spells out what my next eight years will involve! I’ve done this before.
ASE: Thanks for your time, Scott. It’s been a pleasure.
SAJ: Thank you.
Natalya Murakhver is a freelance writer/PR consultant based in New York City.
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